Katie

“For black people, being around white people is sometimes like taking care of babies you don't like, babies who throw up on you again and again, but whom you cannot punish, because they're babies.”
― Hilton Als, White Girls

“I love you, and I love the world, and I love it more with every new inch I discover. But you are a black boy, and you must be responsible for your body in a way that other boys cannot know. Indeed, you must be responsible for the worst actions of other black bodies, which, somehow, will always be assigned to you. And you must be responsible for the bodies of the powerful -- the policeman who cracks you with a nightstick will quickly find his excuse in your furtive movements.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me

“A smell of sandalwood boxes, a kind of glaze on the air from all the chintzes numbed his earthy vitality, he became all ribs and uniform.”
― Elizabeth Bowen, The Last September

“You have to do normal things or they don't go away. You have to reassure them. Or they just stand there staring at you, as if you're a car-crash, or pornography.”
― Rupert Thomson, The Insult